Citation

de Beukelaar TT, Woolley DG, Wenderoth N. Cortex 2014; 59C: 138-145.

Affiliation

Movement Control and Neuroplasticity Research Group, Department of Kinesiology, KU Leuven, Belgium; Neural Control of Movement Lab, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Electronic address: nicole.wenderoth@hest.ethz.ch.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Masson Editeur)

DOI

10.1016/j.cortex.2014.07.008

PMID

25173992

Abstract

When a stable memory is reactivated it becomes transiently labile and requires restabilization, a process known as reconsolidation. Animal studies have convincingly demonstrated that during reconsolidation memories are modifiable and can be erased when reactivation is followed by an interfering intervention. Few studies have been conducted in humans, however, and results are inconsistent regarding the extent to which a memory can be degraded. We used a motor sequence learning paradigm to show that the length of reactivation constitutes a crucial boundary condition determining whether human motor memories can be degraded. In our first experiment, we found that a short reactivation (less than 60 sec) renders the memory labile and susceptible to degradation through interference, while a longer reactivation does not. In our second experiment, we reproduce these results and show a significant linear relationship between the length of memory reactivation and the detrimental effect of the interfering task performed afterwards, i.e., the longer the reactivation, the smaller the memory loss due to interference. Our data suggest that reactivation via motor execution activates a time-dependent process that initially destabilizes the memory, which is then followed by restabilization during further practice.

Language: en